skip to main content
10.1145/1967486.1967545acmotherconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagesiiwasConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

Second life for illiterates: a 3D virtual world platform for adult basic education

Published: 08 November 2010 Publication History

Abstract

Illiteracy is still a dilemma, around more than 700 million adults in the world are unable to read and write. In the present modern society, technology is used to provide the techno-literacy solutions to help out the illiterates. Unfortunately, these solutions rarely consider the traditional learning theories and exploit two-dimensional (2D) platforms. Furthermore these techno-literacy solutions focus on desktop applications such as movies, recorded lectures on CDs and web-based application like 2D text-based instructional programs and games. These 2D applications are lacking the features such as self-presence, social-presence, situated-learning, embodied environment and learning by doing suggested in the traditional learning theories. There is a need to bridge the gap between technology-based solutions and traditional learning theories and to exploit emergent three-dimensional (3D) technologies to provide these lacking features. In this paper, we explore how the benefits of 3D emergent technologies like Second Life (SL) are exploited in coherence with traditional theories for Adult Basic Education (ABE). We present an immersive learning platform based on Multiple Intelligences (MI) Theory. We design and discuss an adaptive learning scenario for ABE in the SL. Finally we scrutinize the proposed platform to get an overview of the strengths and weaknesses in the intended area of application.

References

[1]
Aanstoos, J. 2003. Visual literacy: An Overview. 32nd Applied Imagery Pattern Recognition Workshop (AIPR'03), pp. 189.
[2]
Akan, K. D., Farrell, S. P., Zerull, L. M., Mahone, I. H. & Guerlain, S. 2006. eScreening: Developing an Electronic Screening Tool for Rural Primary Care, Proceeding of System and Information Engineering Design Symposium, pp. 212--215.
[3]
Askov, Eunice, N. 1989. Adult Literacy, Computer Technology, and the Hearing Impaired, Proceedings of the Literacy and the Hearing Impaired conference, pp. 151--192.
[4]
Compact Oxford English Dictionary, http://www.askoxford.com/concise_oed/illiterate?view=uk. Last Accessed November 11, 2009.
[5]
Craats, I. Van de. 2007. OBSTACLES ON HIGHWAY L2, In Proceedings of the second annual forum The Literacy Institute at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, pp. 149--163.
[6]
Curtis, M. E., 2006. The Role of Vocabulary Instruction in Adult Basic Education, in: Comings, J., Garner, B., Smith, C., Review of Adult Learning and Literacy, Volume 6, Routledge, USA, pp. 43--69.
[7]
D. Wirastuti., Luckin, R., Ray, E. Sherrif, R., Walker, K., Underwood, J., Dunckley, L. 2008. Development of a knowledge management system integrated with local communication channels and knowledge management initiatives for Kenyan rural farming, 5th Int'l Conf. on Wireless, Mobile and Ubiquitous Technologies in Education (WMUTE2008), Beijing-China, pp. 23--26.
[8]
Dale, E. 1969. Audio-Visual Methods in Teaching, 3rd Edition, New York, Holt, Rinehart, and Winston.
[9]
Dighe, A. 2004. Pedagogical Approaches to Literacy Acquisition and Effective Programme Design, Background paper for Education for All Global Monitoring Report.
[10]
Dobriceanu, O. D., Nicola, H. 2006. Low Cost Literacy e-Learning Tool, International Symposium on Power Electronics, Electrical Drives, Automation and Motion (SPEEDAM '06), pp. 1483--1488.
[11]
Eberle, A., Robinson, S. 1980. The adult illiterate speaks out: personal perspectives on learning to read and write, Washington, D.C. National Institute of Education, U.S. Dept. of Education.
[12]
Edmunds, C., Lowe, K., Murray, M., & Seymour, A. 2002. The Ultimate Educator: Achieving Maximum Adult Learning through Training and Instruction, National Victim Assistance Academy (Advance Topic Series). Washington, DC: US Department of Justice, Office of Victims of Crime. http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/ovc/assist/educator/welcome.html Last Accessed November 11, 2009.
[13]
e-Learning for Adults. http://www.elfora.net/. Last Accessed November 11, 2009.
[14]
Gardner, H. 1983. Frames of mind: A theory of multiple intelligences, New York, Basic Books.
[15]
Kam, M., Agarwal, A., Kumar, A., Lal, S., Mathur, A., Tewari, A., Canny, J. 2008. Designing E-Learning Games for Rural Children in India: A Format for Balancing Learning with Fun, Proceedings of the 7th ACM conference on Designing interactive system, pp. 58--67.
[16]
Koh, J., Young-Gul, K., Butler, B. & Bock, G-W. 2007. Encouraging Participation in Virtual Communities, Communications of the ACM, Vol. 50, No. 2, p. 69--73.
[17]
Kolb, David A. 1984. Experiential Learning: Experience as the Source of Learning and Development, Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliffs, N.J.
[18]
Krudenier, J. 2002. Research-Based Principles for Adult Basic Education Reading Instruction, National Institute for Literacy, Washington, DC.
[19]
Lave, J., & Wenger, E. 1990. Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation, Cambridge, UK, Cambridge University Press.
[20]
Learning Theories.com, Knowledge Base and Webliography. Last Accessed November 11, 2009.
[21]
Literacy Games for Adults, NWT Literacy council. http://www.nald.ca/library/learning/howtokit/games/games.pdf, Last Accessed November 11, 2009.
[22]
Mehdi, I., Sagar, A., Toyama, K. 2006. Text-Free User Interface for Illiterate and Semi-Literate Users, International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development (ICTED' 06), pp. 72--82.
[23]
Merriam, S. B. 2001. Andragogy and Self-Directed Learning. In The New Update on Adult Learning Theory. New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education no. 89, edited by S. B. Merriam, pp. 3--13. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
[24]
Millar, D. 1996. Executive Summary of the Use of Educational Software in Adult Literacy Programs: A Comparison of Integrated Learning Systems and Stand-Alone Software, Ottawa, National Literacy Secretariat.
[25]
Molka-Danielsen, E. J., Deutschmann, M. 2009. Learning and Teaching in the Virtual World of Second Life, Tapir Academic Press.
[26]
Online Degree World, Education for Everyone. http://www.onlinedegreeworld.com/blog/2009/100-best-websites-for-free-adult-education/, Last Accessed November 11, 2009.
[27]
Online Encyclopedia, http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O999-illiterate.html. Last Accessed November 11, 2009.
[28]
Patel, N., Agarwal, S., Rajput, N., Nanavati, A., Dave, P., S. Parikh, T. 2009. A comparative study of speech and dialed input voice interfaces in rural India, Proceeding of the 27th International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 51--54.
[29]
Plauche, M., Nallasamy, U., Pal, J., Wooters, C., Ramachandran, D. 2006. Speech Recognition for Illiterate Access to Information and Technology, International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development, UC Berkeley (ICTD' 06), pp. 83--92.
[30]
Rajput, N., Agarwal, S., Kumar, A., Anil Nanavati, A. 2008. An Alternative Information Web for Visually Impaired Users in Developing Countries, Proceeding of the 10th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computer and Accessibility, pp. 289--290.
[31]
Rankin, Y. A., Gold, R., Gooch, B. 2006. Evaluating Interactive Gaming as a Language Learning Tool, Proceedings for ACM SIGGRAPH Conference.
[32]
Richmond, M., Robinson, C. & Sachs-Israel, M. 2008. The global literacy challenge: A profile of youth and adult literacy at the midpoint of the United Nations Literacy Decade 2003--2012: UNESCO.
[33]
Robbins, S. 2007. A futurist's view of Second Life Education: A Developing Taxonomy of Digital Spaces, In Proceeding of Second Life Education Workshop, pp. 27--33.
[34]
Second Life, a 3D Virtual World, http://secondlife.com/. Last Accessed November 11, 2009.
[35]
Sibiya, S., and Rooyen, L. V. 2005. Illiterates in South Africa: Who are They and what Motivates them to Participate in literacy Campaigns? International Review of Education, 51(5--6): 479--497.
[36]
Taoufik, I., Kabaili, H., Ketttani D. 2007. Designing an e-government portal accessible to illiterate citizens, Proceedings of the 1st international conference on Theory and practice of electronic governance, pp. 327--336.
[37]
UNESCO Education Sector. 2004. Position Paper: The Plurality of Literacy and its Implications for Policies and Programmes. Paris: UNESCO.
[38]
Walsh, P., Meade, J. 2003. Speech Enabled E-Learning for Adult Literacy Tutoring, Proceeding of the 3rd IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies, (ICALT' 03), Vol. 1, pp. 17.
[39]
William, S., McMinn, J. 2009. Knowing Culture in Second Life: International literacy and technological know how in virtual world, International conference on Multimedia and Information and communication Technologies in Education, Lisbon, Portugal, pp. 616--621.
[40]
World Reference English Dictionary, http://www.wordreference.com/definition/illiterate. Last Accessed November 11, 2009.

Cited By

View all

Recommendations

Reviews

Jeanine M. Meyer

This paper describes building a platform in Second Life for teaching illiterate adults. It starts with a review of the literature on adult illiteracy and different learning theories, most notably Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences. The authors argue that 3D environments such as Second Life offer advantages. The platform includes facilities for maintaining information on users, such as background and performance, and using the information to modify learning scenarios. Three scenarios have been designed. In the basic linguistic scenario, the players move their avatars near objects (called metaphors)-for example, an apple with the text "A." Audio is played of "A" and "apple." The player then clicks on the object using the mouse. The basic numeracy scenario was not described. The games scenario performs evaluation: the player enters a room, hears letter sounds, and then clicks on the corresponding metaphors. The benefits of the 3D environment are not apparent. After all, reading is a 2D experience, and, in terms of Gardner's multiple intelligences, linguistic intelligence is the one that matters for literacy. The authors do not report on testing with actual subjects. The scenarios described would only serve absolute illiterates. Functional illiterates would not benefit; in fact, they may be annoyed by the activity. Online Computing Reviews Service

Symeon D. Retalis

The affordances of 3D virtual environments can support teaching and learning in school education [1]. Studies show that the utilization of 3D learning environments in educational practice can yield significant benefits, not only in terms of knowledge acquisition but also in the development of skills, attitudes, and motivation, at both an individual level and, more importantly, a group level [2]. This paper proposes an adaptive learning environment for improving adult literacy skills and practices based on the Second Life 3D desktop platform. The motivation for proposing this learning environment stems from the fact that 3D platforms-as opposed to 2D desktop educational software-can support self and social presence, situated learning, learning by doing, and other functions that are important for adult basic education (ABE). As the authors claim, there is an increasing interest in using digital learning technologies for ABE. The authors rightly mention that well-defined scenarios should accompany these technologies, and that the technologies should be adaptive in order to meet the diverse needs of adults [3]. One important issue that this paper does not adequately deal with is the fact that the use of technology for ABE requires digital literacy skills. Typically, illiterate people do not have such skills. The digital divide phenomenon is quite eminent, and adults will face a steep learning curve when using Second Life [4]. It cannot be assumed that learners of this generation will be either comfortable or savvy with 3D virtual environments. Additionally, the use of a 3D virtual learning environment does not suggest a priori that it will draw on the actual experiences, developmental stages, and problems of adult learners. Thus, any developers and adopters of this proposed learning method and tool should consider one of the main adult education principles: develop, integrate, and use instructional materials that are based on adult learners' lives and experiences [5,6]. The authors of this interesting paper discuss how to promote adult literacy skills via 3D virtual learning environments. There is no empirical data about the effectiveness of such environments for ABE, and no good design practices exist. Further experimentation is necessary. Online Computing Reviews Service

Access critical reviews of Computing literature here

Become a reviewer for Computing Reviews.

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Other conferences
iiWAS '10: Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Information Integration and Web-based Applications & Services
November 2010
895 pages
ISBN:9781450304214
DOI:10.1145/1967486
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Sponsors

  • IIWAS: International Organization for Information Integration
  • Web-b: Web-b

In-Cooperation

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 08 November 2010

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Check for updates

Author Tags

  1. 3D virtual world (VW)
  2. adaptive interfaces
  3. adult basic education (ABE)
  4. second life (SL)
  5. techno-literacy

Qualifiers

  • Research-article

Conference

iiWAS '10
Sponsor:
  • IIWAS
  • Web-b

Contributors

Other Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

  • Downloads (Last 12 months)20
  • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0
Reflects downloads up to 13 Feb 2025

Other Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all

View Options

Login options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

PDF

eReader

View online with eReader.

eReader

Figures

Tables

Media

Share

Share

Share this Publication link

Share on social media